My Recent 10 Plays

Work and life have made gaming difficult lately. I work for a small company in the Ag business, and we tend to be extremely busy from February to May due to farmers in the US and Canada getting to planting season, and our systems go on planters and sprayers. And I’m in purchasing, so it’s a rough time making sure we have parts, in addition to a couple of ambitious new products being released, and the headaches that can come with that.

So I’m in a bit of a non-gaming rut right now. We’ve had kids plays, both attending a friend’s daughter’s school theater doing Pippen, to my older daughter being the assistant stage manager for her high school’s production of Grease. And I tend to hit a bit of a lull every year around now. I think it’s just the winter dragging on (And here in Kansas, it’s actually been wintery this year.), and awaiting spring.

So I almost forgot to write a post today. I went to the site to try to think of a quick topic, and I noticed that 8 of my 10 most recent play are new games to me, so I thought I’d share some brief thought on them all. Although I will admit, this isn’t something I’m very good at.

I kind of think I need to actually write a review of Palm Island at this point, I talk about it enough. I’ll stop discussing it at this point.

The other game I had played previously was Fleet. I also used the Arctic Bounty expansion to play it solo. I really enjoyed it. You use a bot basically to sim a couple of other players. I did quite well against one of them, and only lost by a couple of points to the other. I don’t know why we don’t play this game more. It’s a really good example of using cards multiple ways, and has some good decisions. It’s a really good game that we don’t play…

On to the rest. I’ll start with Just One. It’s a party game where everyone writes a clue on a board, and one player has to guess what the word is. The trick is that you have to remove any matching clues. It’s fun, simple, and plays a big group. This one impressed me.

That same day I got to try On Tour. As I’ve said before I love roll and writes. This one has amazing production values, and was a fun time. I did terrible, but it’s another game that can play a lot of players at once.

I picked up a copy of Shadowrun Crossfire: Prime Runner Edition on a Miniature Market dropping price deal. I love deck builders, and I’ve always been fascinated by the Shadowrun universe and how it combines a couple of my favorite things, magic & cyberpunk. Throw co-op in, and it screams a game I’d enjoy. And I do. I like it a lot. It plays really quickly, and it’s been extremely difficult so far, but it’s a blast. It’s also able to be played solitaire, so I look forward to trying it that way too.

Drew invited Bryan, Eric and I over to play the next few games. We had a really nice Sunday of just hanging out and playing stuff. We started with The Gallerist. For a game with this many mechanics, it kind of makes sense thematically. A really clever game, that I would never intentionally be any good at, too many things going on. It’s pretty fun though, and I’d gladly play it again. It was a quick 2 and a half hours, and that says a lot.

The next game we played is one of the most hyped games of the past several years, Scythe. I’m not even sure what’s the best way to describe it. It’s an interesting theme, although it doesn’t really play to the theme. I really liked the asymmetrical factions.. It has direct conflict, which I’m not a huge fan of, but it’s typically not a huge part of individual games. It was a really fun time. I won this one, but part of it was that my faction fit well to score me points, and yet even though I rushed to end the game, I still needed a tie-breaker to win, and that’s a cool thing too, not just the person with the most stars wins. The more I think back to it, the more I realize how much fun I had. Yet I’m not sure I would ever be very good at this one either.

The last one we tried that afternoon was Dice Hospital. It’s a dice manipulation game, and it’s pretty fun. It’s got a bit of brain burning to it though, so it’s not a light game, but isn’t overly complicated either. I’ll gladly try it again.

One last game on the list, and it’s a doozy. Fog of Love is a game that I have wanted since I first heard about it. It’s a romantic comedy in a box, but it’s more than that. It’s definitely not a game like any other I’ve played. It’s original and fun. One other thing is it has one of the best tutorials I’ve seen. It plays you through the game without railroading you. It’s an experience game to be sure, but I am looking forward to trying it again. I’d also like to see how it play with someone other than Dina, I think it’s a different game when it’s not your spouse playing the other person.

Wow, that got longer than I expected, I hope you stuck with me. What games have you been playing lately, and what have you enjoyed? It was a good month or so in that I played a bunch of good games.

I liked Sagrada solo quite a bit too. But it’s definitely better with more players. Roll Player however did not work well for me solo, not sure why exactly, I just didn’t enjoy it. I really like it with other players. I played them solo around the same time, so for some reason I link them together 😁.